Lehmann Maupin's First 30 Years

Rachel Lehmann and David Maupin first meet at Rachel’s gallery in Geneva.

The founders met again in Basel, Switzerland at Art Basel in 1992. At the time, Rachel was working as a gallerist in Switzerland, showing artists like Wim Delvoye, Candida Höfer, Jeff Koons, and David Salle. Meanwhile, David was a Director at New York’s groundbreaking Metro Pictures gallery. In 1993, he and Rachel—along with Janelle Reiring and Helene Winer of Metro Pictures—opened Offshore Gallery in East Hampton, exhibiting artists including Richard Prince, David Salle, and Ross Bleckner. They operated Offshore until summer of 1994 before David and Rachel decided to establish a new gallery together just two years later.

The inaugural gallery space was designed by architect Rem Koolhaas, with the intention of it being “an extension of the artist studio and was very flexible for ambitious installations,” said David Maupin.

On September 19, 1996, the New York Times spoke to the gallery founders for a profile on the Dutch architect. “As to how such a heavy-gun architect came to design the gallery, Mr. Maupin, whose partner is Rachel Lehmann, said, “It all happened in such an organic, natural way.” The two men met at a gallery, Mr. Maupin said. “I arranged for Rem to visit some artists’ studios, and soon we were talking about a gallery space. Then it was more like getting design advice from a friend.””

—Size Is in the Eye of the Architect, The New York Times by Julie V. Iovine, 1996

The gallery opened its doors on October 3, 1996 at 39 Greene Street in New York’s Soho neighborhood. The inaugural exhibition, Moving Structures, featured painting, sculpture, and photography by Richard Artschwager, Wim Delvoye, and Carroll Dunham, as well as a video installation by Tony Oursler, with whom we still work today.

The gallery’s fourth exhibition, titled The Crystal Stopper, opened in March 1997. Curated by Carlos Basualdo (who is now the Director of the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, Texas), the show was organized around the theme of the mirror and its place in contemporary identity formation. It featured works by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Dan Graham, and Alfredo Jaar, among others—alongside Teresita Fernández, with whom we still work today.

The gallery’s first exhibition with Gilbert & George opened in May 1997. Presented in collaboration with Sonnabend Gallery, The Fundamental Pictures showcased a series of 39 works incorporating microscopic views of urine, semen, blood, and excrement.

We continue to work with Gilbert & George today, and have presented 13 solo and group exhibitions with the artists since The Fundamental Pictures.

David and Rachel were featured in Vanity Fair at the end of 1998, which recapped the gallery’s success since its inception.

“In two years, the Lehmann Maupin gallery has shaken up the New York art world under a partnership that knows the value of shock and the thrill of adventure.” – Bob Colacello

David Maupin first encountered the work of David Salle during his college years, after seeing the painting Brother Animal at MOCA in Los Angeles, making it deeply serendipitous when Salle became represented by Lehmann Maupin years later.

David Salle’s first solo exhibition with Lehmann Maupin was held in 1999 at our original Greene Street space in New York. Glass and Mirror Paintings featured six works that explored reflection, disjunction, and fragmentation through a mysterious and suggestive juxtaposition of narrative elements.

The gallery published a catalog to accompany the exhibition, which featured an essay on David Salle’s work by writer and professor Molly Nesbit. Since then, the gallery has presented 7 solo exhibitions by Salle.

Tracey Emin’s Every Part of Me’s Bleeding opened in May 1999, which marked the British artist’s first one-person exhibition in the United States. The exhibition consisted of many works done in a variety of media including several large-scale sculptures, drawings, neon pieces, video and a quilt.

In the same year, Emin was shortlisted for the prestigious Turner Prize, for her controversial and highly publicized installation My Bed. Showcased in the exhibition, My Bed is a raw, autobiographical installation that consists of Emin’s actual unmade, disheveled bed.

Do Ho Suh’s first exhibition with Lehmann Maupin opened in September 2000. It was also the artist’s first solo exhibition in the United States.

The show featured a site-specific installation that utilized the gallery’s floors and walls to present a series of works that considered themes of cultural displacement and the relationship between collectivity and individuality. The central work, Floor, was composed of over 180,000 small figures that supported a glass surface for visitors to walk across.

Lehmann Maupin has championed Suh since the early stages of his career and has witnessed his emergence on the international art scene. The gallery also represents his late father and esteemed abstract and traditional painter, Suh Se Ok.

In April 2002, we opened Tony Oursler’s first solo show with the gallery, featuring a series of acrylic paintings on paper.

Offering an unfiltered look at the artist’s creative process, his drawings revealed the genesis of concepts and themes that remain at the center of Oursler’s multimedia practice today, like the influence mass communication, technology, and the supernatural have on society.

Oursler was previously included in Lehmann Maupin’s inaugural exhibition in 1996, as well as a two-person collaborative show with Mike Kelley staged at the gallery in 1998.

In October 2002, Teresita Fernández presented her first solo exhibition with the gallery. In total, the artist and MacArthur Fellow has been featured in over 20 solo and group exhibitions at Lehmann Maupin since 1997.

Teresita Fernández offers these recollections of her 2002 exhibition: “I remember that I specifically wanted to install Waterfall at Lehmann Maupin to make it look like it was flowing from the opening in the ceiling that architect Rem Koolhaas had designed in the gallery. Waterfall was originally made for a solo show Louis Grachos invited me to do at SITE Santa Fe and was later shown at Castello di Rivoli in Turin. It was designed in a very low-tech way with thousands of strips of acrylic that I had cut for me on Canal Street.”

Rather than a single group exhibition, the gallery marked its 10th anniversary by hosting a series of major solo and thematic presentations throughout the year.

Mr.’s first solo exhibition in New York was staged at Lehmann Maupin in 2007.

The Japanese artist’s show featured the large-scale installation Strawberry Voice, which presented an imagined environment within the head of one of the artist’s signature cartoonish characters.

Mr. is known for approaching the visual language of anime and manga as a means of examining Japanese culture, fusing high and low forms of contemporary expression. Over the years, he has been featured in nine solo and group exhibitions at Lehmann Maupin.

Mickalene Thomas was part of our artist program from 2007–2018. Her first New York solo exhibition opened in March 2009 at our 26th Street space in Chelsea. She’s Come UnDone! the show featured new paintings, photographs, and collages.

During this decade together, Thomas was included in eight solo and group exhibitions at our New York and Hong Kong galleries. Blurring the distinction between object and subject, concrete and abstract, real and imaginary, Thomas examines and challenges complex ideas around femininity, sexuality, class, and power.

We then presented Hernan Bas’ first exhibition with the gallery in April 2009 in New York, corresponding with a major solo show of his work at the Brooklyn Museum.

The exhibition featured nine paintings that are heavily influenced by the Romantic era of the 18th century and the Decadent movement of the 19th century. In the two decades since Bas joined our program, he has continued his painting practice that weaves together adolescent adventures with classical poetry, religious stories, mythology, the paranormal, and literature.

By the end of the decade, further expansion was already in the works, this time on an international scale. The gallery’s propelling success in the United States reached the Middle East and Asia in 2010, with our first pop-up exhibition in Istanbul. With a historical connection to the East, our Hong Kong gallery opened in 2013. In 2017, we opened a two-floor gallery in Seoul.

Nari Ward’s first exhibition with the gallery, LIVESupport, showcased a new body of work by the New York-based artist that articulated a dialogue surrounding the idea of ​​support: physical, spiritual, social, and judicial.

Since joining the gallery in 2010, Nari Ward has had 7 solo exhibitions and participated in six group exhibitions across our global galleries. Ward’s work explores themes of race, democracy, migration, and community through everyday found objects and installation-based sculptural works.

Erwin Wurm’s first exhibition with the gallery, titled gulp, opened in November 2010, featuring sculpture, photography, paintings, and a video work.

Emily Nathan reviewed the exhibition in Artforum, noting “Wurm has demonstrated a continued interest in materially articulating the moments in which, interior meeting exterior, our individual selves must interact with the pressures dictated by all that exists outside of us: fashion, reputation, culture.” The exhibition was praised for its deadpan humor and thought-provoking commentary on contemporary society.

Alex Prager’s first show with the gallery opened in January 2014 and spanned both our 26th Street and Chrystie Street locations in New York.

Face in the Crowd presented a series of large-scale photographs of crowd scenes and a film starring Hollywood actress Elizabeth Banks, presented as an immersive, three-channel installation. Alex has continued to collaborate with the actress over the years. Most notably, they teamed up for Prager’s debut psychological thriller film, DreamQuil.

In November 2014, Kader Attia’s first exhibition with the gallery featured a room-filling installation of over 100 household doors titled Asesinos ! Asesinos ! Presented at our former Lower East Side gallery in New York, the installation recalled bodies in a crowd that surged forward in protest, a sensation enhanced by the title, which means ‘Murderers! Murderers!’, and the silent megaphones mounted on top of the doors.

In February 2015, we celebrated the opening of our 22nd Street gallery in Chelsea, New York with the exhibition Future Seasons Past. Spanning both the new Chelsea location and our Lower East Side gallery, the group show celebrated Lehmann Maupin’s nearly 20-year history, while offering a look towards its future. Curated by Manuel E. Gonzalez (curator of the Ellipse Foundation, Portugal), this marked Manuel’s second collaboration with Lehmann Maupin.

“Along with the opening of the new gallery space, this exhibition is a fantastic moment to pause and reflect on the last 19 years of the gallery and the history we have created—to look back on all the great artists we have worked with and the significant exhibitions we have put on. I look forward to the next 19 years!” – David Maupin, 2015

A brand new viewing office in Seoul opened in December 2017, with an inaugural presentation of works by some of the gallery's artists, marking the gallery's second space in Asia.

Under the leadership of our Seoul-based Partner Emma Son, Lehmann Maupin became one of the first international galleries to establish a permanent space in South Korea with the opening of this first location in the Sogyeokdong neighborhood of Seoul.

Since then, Son led the development and opening of a new location in Seoul in the Hannam-dong neighborhood of the city, where the gallery is currently based. Furthermore, Son has introduced a number of pioneering Korean artists to Lehmann Maupin’s growing roster, most recently Seung Neung Kyung in 2023 and Kim Yun Shin in 2024, and oversaw the debut of solo exhibitions in South Korea at Lehmann Maupin by keystone gallery artists like Lari Pittman, Nari Ward, and Teresita Fernández.

Cecilia Vicuña’s inaugural exhibition La India Contaminada was held in May 2018. While the Chilean-born artist has lived in New York and exhibited widely in the United States and abroad for over three decades, this was the first comprehensive survey of her work in New York.

The exhibition featured Vicuña’s raw wool installations known as ‘quipus,’ mixed-media sculptures referred to as ‘precarios,’ video, and paintings, spanning 1969-2017. La India Contaminada ran concurrently with a solo exhibition of her Disappeared Quipu at the Brooklyn Museum.

McArthur Binion’s inaugural exhibition with the gallery–and his first show in New York–was held at our new 24th Street gallery in January 2019. Hand:Work marked an important point in the artist’s career, as both an evolution of and departure from his most well-known body of work, the DNA Series.

Then in April, we opened Heidi Bucher: The Site of Memory. The exhibition marked Bucher’s first solo presentation since her landmark survey in 2018 at Parasol unit foundation for contemporary art in London, and her first with the gallery. This show featured work from the mid-1970s through the 1980s and included some of her most significant sculptures, as well as works that were be exhibited for the first time in the United States.

We opened our first space in London in October 2020. Based in South Kensington, Cromwell Place was a new arts hub comprising five Grade II-listed Victorian houses where Lehmann Maupin’s space occupied three converted period rooms on the first floor. It functioned as a dynamic multi-purpose space, offering an alternative to the traditional gallery model.

The gallery has long maintained strong ties with London through its artists based in or around the city, including Billy Childish, Mandy El-Sayegh, Gilbert & George, Shirazeh Houshiary, Do Ho Suh, and Juergen Teller. By expanding to London, one of the largest art markets worldwide, Lehmann Maupin strengthened its connections in the United Kingdom and Europe and provided a bridge for its artists’ activity internationally.

On the Other Side of Everything was Calida Rawles’ first solo exhibition in New York and her first with the gallery since joining Lehmann Maupin in February 2021. Created during the racial reckoning and global pandemic of 2020 and 2021, the works in this exhibition spoke to the artist’s interest in the formal, metaphorical, and political complexities of Black bodies.

In December 2021, we mounted Marilyn Minter’s first solo exhibition in mainland China. Held at Blanc Art Space in the Shunyi District, Beijing, this space marked the gallery’s first physical location in the city, following the success of recent pop-ups in Aspen, Palm Beach, and Taipei.

We presented Off the beaten track: the artistic meanderings of Sung Neung Kyung in October 2024, the artist’s first solo exhibition outside of Korea. On the heels of Sung’s inclusion in Only the Young: Experimental Art in Korea, 1960s–1970s at the Guggenheim Museum, the artist staged the US debut of his Fanning the fire of poetry and Drawing performance.

Throughout the past 30 years, the gallery's presence has evolved beyond its physical spaces and programming. What began as a commitment to presenting bold, boundary-pushing work has become a sustained effort to build transnational connections in the contemporary art scene. With a roster of 46 artists from around the world, we continue to champion artists whose practices are united by their innovative approaches to their respective mediums and introduce international artists in new geographies. As we enter into the next 30 years, our commitment to this cross-cultural sensibility, ambition, and risk-taking work remains unwavering.

On the 30th anniversary of our inaugural exhibition opening, we are pleased to introduce a new brand identity for the first time since 1996.

The new website and visual identity build on our long-lasting forward-looking spirit, opening new avenues for audiences to engage more deeply with the gallery, our artists, and their work. At the heart of the new identity is our signature blue—a visual throughline that connects our history with the future. Through a more accessible and dynamic digital experience on our website, we hope to foster meaningful connections across the globe and introduce new audiences to the boundary-pushing ideas and practices that define our program.